Updating to lenny from etch

Debian uses the Linux kernel (the core of an operating system), but most of the basic OS tools come from the GNU project; hence the name GNU/Linux.

Debian GNU/Linux provides more than a pure OS: it comes with more than 15490 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

I performed a successful update through apt-get dist upgrade after changing the configuration files, but I can tell you from experience that Debian testing is essentially worthless. If you want a more modern distro, abandon Debian entirely and use Cent OS, Arch, Fedora, etc. When I got my server in 2006 I investigated what distro to run, and ended up with Debian.

Enormous breakage webs, constant breakage, patches for shell shock and heartbleed level bugs take literally two weeks, half-baked configurations, and a thousand other reasons. Those distros are built for new packages and handle them much, much, much more gracefully. Red Hat has left a bitter taste in my mouth after the amount of security issues it had back in the late 90s, early 2000s, but I'm sure they've come a long, long way since then.

Dual-boot is also useful if you wish to install Linux on a notebook to take advantage of all of the free network monitoring and testing tools available (bing, wireshark, mrtg, nmap, ntop, etc.).

When setting up a dual-boot system you can either have unpartitioned space on single hard-drive or a second unpartitioned hard-drive in the system.

What's better for me — the minimal bootable CD-ROM or the full CDs?

It depends, but we think that in many cases the minimal CD image is better — above all, you only download the packages that you selected for installation on your machine, which saves both time and bandwidth.

Also this is used by various companies like Netcraft to gather the required information for their statistics.

The network install assumes that you have a connection to the Internet.

Various different ways are supported for this, like analogue PPP dial-up, Ethernet, WLAN (with some restrictions), but ISDN is not — sorry!

# /etc/sudoers # # This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.